Radical Right Ideologies and Movements in Brazil

Abstract

Far-right movements, groups, and parties are a constant in Brazilian history. Following the first moment in which we can identify the presence of the radical right in Brazil (1889), its history had several phases and moments: ultraconservative movements and monarchists in the early years of the Old Republic (1889–1930), reactionary leagues fighting socialism and the labor movement during and after World War I (1917–1922) and the first groups and fascist movements (1922–1932). In the 1930s, in turn, the formation of the largest fascist movement outside Europe, Integralism (1932–1938), and Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo (1937–1945) represented the peak of the far right in the country, when it almost became a valid alternative to power. Between 1945 and 1964, the far right rebuilt itself in reactionary Catholic and anti-communist groups, close or not to neofascism. Under the military dictatorship of 1964–1985, it was in the fringes of power, remaining in the shadows after the redemocratization in 1985. In the 21st century, in turn, it acquired power and visibility, equaling or perhaps even surpassing that of the 1930s. Recent Brazilian historiography, after attempts to reconstruct the history of the national right wing, has been moving toward a comparative approach in order to understand the dialogue between the national and the international within the specific field of the radical right. Dialogue is a fitting term, since the far right in Brazil was never completely original, but nor was it simply a copy of a foreign model. It is the role of the historian to understand this dialogue through the investigation of the links and mechanisms of transmission of ideas, concepts, and perspectives, the symbolic and material exchanges, between the world and Brazil.